Turkmenistan Grants Red Cross a Prison Tour

The Red Cross has paid a rare visit to a Turkmen prison. A delegation “acquainted itself” with one of the Interior Ministry’s detention centers last week, the International Committee of the Red Cross said in an April 10 statement. The ICRC mission, which included a doctor, also visited the site of a prison under construction.

The statement offered few details, but Reuters reported that this is the first time Ashgabat has allowed a Red Cross delegation into a prison since Turkmenistan’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Last July, a team from the Red Cross visited a prison medical facility.

"These visits are a stage in Turkmenistan's many-sided cooperation with the ICRC," the statement said.

The Associated Press said the visit “appears to represent a breakthrough” in the reclusive and authoritarian country. “Turkmenistan’s authoritarian government has long been criticized for refusing international access to inmates in detention and prison.”

Foreign-based Turkmen rights activists say the country’s jails are overcrowded and that disease is rife. Authorities are believed to routinely imprison dissidents.

A 2010 report by foreign-based Turkmenistan’s Independent Lawyers Association and the Turkmen Initiative for Human Rights estimated that there were around 8,100 inmates in the countries at the time. The exact number fluctuates considerably, however, due to periodic widespread amnesties and no official figures are made available

After coming to power in 2006, President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov promised democratic reforms. Critics say those promises have not been kept.

Human rights activists describe Turkmenistan as one of the world’s most repressive states, where basic liberties are routinely flouted and dissidents languish in jail for years without contact with the outside world.

During the United Nations Human Rights Committee hearings in March, officials from Ashgabat appeared to be in “complete denial” when it comes to respecting basic rights, a representative of Human Rights Watch was quoted as saying.

Independent observers believe it is highly doubtful the ICRC visit will prompt any meaningful change in Turkmenistan, but that authorities there will likely point to the visit alone as progress.